Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks


John Curran - 2009
    After the death of her only child, 73 handwritten notebooks came to light, from single jots to lists, to full outlines of memorable plots and characters, plus grocery and schedule memos from a bountiful creative mind - a complex web of connections to unravel and link. Actual notebook page reproductions. 2 unpublished Hercule Poirot short stories: "The Capture of Cerebrus", and "The Incident of the Dog's Ball".

The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News


Roger Mudd - 2008
    Appearing at the steps of Congress every morning, noon, and night for the twelve weeks of filibuster, he established a reputation as a leading political reporter. Mudd was one of half a dozen major figures in the stable of CBS News broadcasters at a time when the network's standing as a provider of news was at its peak. In The Place to Be, Mudd tells of how the bureau worked: the rivalries, the egos, the pride, the competition, the ambitions, and the gathering frustrations of conveying the world to a national television audient in thirty minutes minus commercials. It is the story of a unique TV news bureau, unmatched in its quality, dedication, and professionalism. It shows what TV journalism was once like and what it's missing today.

The Copper Elephant


Adam Rapp - 1999
    She must live in hiding, but if she can dodge burning rain, avoid brutish soldiers, and keep from starving, perhaps she'll survive. She must bond together with other fugitives and refugees to form some kind of family -- and somehow save herself.

Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud


Peter Gay - 1984
    Education of the Senses draws on a vast array of primary sources to reexamine nineteenth-century sexual behavior, overturning a number of stereotypes, especially about women and sexuality.

Christmas in Plains: Memories


Jimmy Carter - 2001
    Amy suggested that they invite the White House staff and their families to join them and to celebrate.Nowadays the Carters’ large family is still together at Christmastime, offering each other the gifts and the lifelong rituals that mark this day for them.With the novelist’s eye that enchanted readers of his memoir An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter has written another American classic, in the tradition of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory and Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Crossfire


Jodie Bailey - 2014
    Josh may have saved her from one attack, but drug smugglers are desperate to get information about one of Andrea's patients—a patient who's disappeared without a trace. Despite the danger, the beautiful counselor refuses to hand over confidential files. Now Josh and Andrea have no choice but to battle on for their lives—and their love—or they'll be the latest casualty to get caught in the crossfire.

American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop


Caroline de Margerie - 2011
    A descendent of Founding Father John Jay, Susan Mary was an American aristocrat whose first marriage gave her full access to post-war diplomatic social life in Paris. There, her circle of friends included Winston Churchill, Isaiah Berlin, Evelyn Waugh, and Christian Dior, among other luminaries, and she had a passionate love affair with British ambassador Duff Cooper. During the golden years of John F. Kennedy’s presidency—after she had married the powerful journalist Joe Alsop—her Washington home was a gathering place for everyone of importance, including Katharine Graham, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger. Dubbed “the second lady of Camelot,” she hosted dinner parties that were the epitome of political power and social arrival, bringing together the movers and shakers not just of the United States, but of the world. Featuring an introduction by Susan Mary Alsop’s goddaughter Frances FitzGerald, American Lady is a fascinating chronicle of a woman who witnessed, as Nancy Mitford once said, “history on the boil.”

I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory


Patricia Hampl - 1999
    Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions, reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!"—a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.

A Pirate for Life


Steve Blass - 2012
    This insider's view of the humorous and bizarre journey of a World Series champion pitcher turned color commentator will delight Pirates and baseball fans alike. Recounting his first years in the Major Leagues and his battle with the baffling condition that would ultimately bear his own name, Steve Blass tells the story of his life on and off the field with a poignant, dazzling wit and shares the life of a baseball player who had the prime of his career cut short.

The Path to Tyranny


Michael E. Newton - 2010
    Throughout history, free societies descended into tyranny when their populations realized they can use the power of government to give themselves benefits at the expense of others. The Path To Tyranny examines how and why each of these free societies descended into tyranny and evaluates the current prospects for the United States.

Danse Macabre


Stephen King - 1981
    In 1981, years before he sat down to tackle On Writing, Stephen King decided to address the topic of what makes horror horrifying and what makes terror terrifying. Here, in ten brilliantly written chapters, King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre—from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.With the insight and good humor his fans appreciated in On Writing, Danse Macabre is an enjoyably entertaining tour through Stephen King’s beloved world of horror.

The Happy Depressive: In Pursuit of Personal and Political Happiness


Alastair Campbell - 2012
    

Meant To Be


Walter Anderson - 2003
    With the publication of this affecting memoir, he reveals the truth about his life and tells the inspirational story of his rags-to-riches career.Anderson grew up on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Mount Vernon, New York, the youngest child of an alcoholic, abusive father. He escaped his situation by quitting high school at sixteen to join the Marines. Four years later, while on leave to attend his father's funeral, he stuns his mother with a question that has inexplicably haunted him since he was a small boy: Was the man who had so tormented him in his childhood his real father? Her answer: Walter was born of a wartime love affair between his Protestant mother and the Jewish man she loved. His mother swears him to secrecy, and he honors their pact for nearly thirty-five years, and then one day he meets an unknown brother -- another son of his real father -- who has lived a similar, nearly parallel life. Their secret, in ways large and small, defines the course of his life. Meant To Be is a love story, a journey of self-discovery and spiritual reckoning, and a provocative challenge to commonly held notions about the role of heredity in our lives. Passionately told and deeply moving, Anderson's memoir is the mesmerizing story that he was always meant to tell.

N. C. Wyeth: A Biography


David Michaelis - 1998
    His illustrations for Scribner's Illustrated Classics (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, The Yearling) are etched into the collective memory of generations of readers. He was hailed as the greatest American illustrator of his day. For forty-three years, starting in 1902, N.C. Wyeth painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet despite worldwide acclaim, he judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance.David Michaelis tells the story of Wyeth's family through four generations -- a saga that begins and ends with tragedy -- and brings to life the huge-spirited, deeply complicated man, and an America that was quickly vanishing.

February House


Sherill Tippins - 2005
    It was a fevered yearlong party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before America entered the war.In spite of the sheer intensity of life at 7 Middagh, the house was for its residents a creative crucible. Carson McCullers's two masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, were born, bibulously, in Brooklyn. Gypsy Rose Lee, workmanlike by day, party girl by night, wrote her book The G-String Murders in her Middagh Street bedroom. Auden -- who along with Britten was being excoriated at home in England for absenting himself from the war -- presided over the house like a peevish auntie, collecting rent money and dispensing romantic advice. And yet all the while he was composing some of the most important work of his career.Sherill Tippins's February House, enlivened by primary sources and an unforgettable story, masterfully recreates daily life at the most fertile and improbable live-in salon of the twentieth century.